>
> Dear all,
>
> at the last kde meeting we've been discussing the usefulness of the use flags
> consolekit and policykit. I'm quoting from the summary:
>
>> scarabeus and dilfridge are in favour of dropping them, since it
>> caused a lot of trouble debugging various user reports. reavertm
>> prefers adding it to IUSE defaults. No consensus was succeeded,
>> the topic will be continued in the gentoo-desktop mailing list.
>
> As an example, according to
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=244444
> policykit is _not_ a hard dependency of kde, but _required_ whenever you want
> to "run as" or configure something in systemsettings as root.
>
> The three options available are
> 1) removing the useflags, effectively "forcing them on". Easiest for us
> maintainers,
> 2) forcing them on with use.force in the profile, and trust that not so many
> users figure out how to get around this :)
> 3) making them "on by default"
>
> As a special gem, after switching one of the flags it may be necessary to
> recompile larger parts of kde and / or restart kdm.
>
> Opinions?

The depedencies are indeed really small, but the reason that some of
us objected is that we want to follow upstream's decisions on what is
optional and what is not. A similar issue that emerged recently is
udisks and friends, which is also optional according to upstream and
not needed for people that want KDElibs for only a few apps and not
for the full DE. We'd like to have some user feedback on this before
our final decision.